Ciceronian Review

Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a success.  It is a delightful book.  It successfully invokes the experience of watching a film in the midst of a novella.  A bit surprising how successful it is, because it invokes film without at all being a graphic novel.  The story is pretty simple and, like a movie, easy to predict where things will go.  The intermixing of images and text effectively shift the story from the words to images.  Even though the images fill a page each, they do not create the sense of mixing in a graphic novel.  It does not take long to read, length of the volume notwithstanding. 

I may be outside the targeted age range for the book -- which won a Caldecott -- but it is still a good book to read on a summer afternoon.

Hunger

Based on some recommendation -- I have forgotten where I saw it -- I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger.  It might have been in a letter from James Wright to Robert Bly, whose afterword to the novel I skipped.  The introduction by Auster also skipped.  It is a relatively short novel, and certainly modernist in the pre-war sense.  The basics of the novel are that it appears as the first person narrative of a journalist who is both without any steady or even remotely sufficient work and likely somewhat insane.  I think it is both.  Not that I have ever been hungry enough to live the relevant circumstances.  But it seems so very different from the description of hunger's effect on the mind by, e.g., Achebe.  That is pretty limited evidence, and however thin it is was I relied on.  Mostly, though, it seemed to me a novel about a man whose mind is not entirely all interconnected, as shown by his odd thoughts and behavior.  And modernist in the self-awareness of the pieces moving apart from one another.  It reminded me, as it does many, of Dostoevsky or, in places, Gogol.  Like them, Hamsun's character is very chatty with himself, and quite funny.  Most of the book I think is quite funny, not just the inner monologues.  The things the speaker does and his circumstances are absurd -- a journalist writing pieces about the meaning of the world while too hungry to think, and the many times his peculiar sense of duty requires him to give away everything.  In that sense, a bit kantian.  And fit quite well into travel to and from a deposition -- another peculiar use of one's time, use to limited ends.

On a different subject, I recommend the comments on the Iranian situation at Fistful of Euros.

Books

Time to catch up on the reading.  I finished Magnifico, and quite liked it.  Well written and entertaining, and through much of it made Lorenzo an interesting person.  Of course it is not the whole world that has an interest in Renaissance Florence, but this is a good work if you do.  And not too weighed down by scholarly apparatus.  Along the way, I got through some other things of entertainment value.  Last Day in Limbo, one of the Modesty Blaise series.  They are truly silly books.  I find the whole series diverting.  Along the same lines really was Gordon Campbell's Missing Witness.  It has a significantly higher degree of versimilitude, but is essentially a diversion.  A bit formulaic, but that is fine with me.  Got through them in a couple of days.  On the hefty side, Collapse by Jared Diamond.  Much better written than his previous book.  The argument is clearly set out.  I am not in a position to assess it, at least, not in a serious way.  I don't have any detailed indpendent knowledge of the societies and places he discusses.  And, in the end, it is hardly a revolutionary thesis -- people sometimes screw up their environment so much that it no longer supports the society.  Hard to see that as controversial.  Also, back in the light entertainment, Bennet Boskey's Some Joys of Lawyering.  Unfortunately I am not so warm about Mr. Boesky.  Different eras I suppose.

The first time I read that Susan Sontag believed that she would never die, I thought it was a small joke or some insider shorthand about fame.  The statement keeps being repeated, and each time apparently the iteration is serious.  Apparently Sontag really did think, until shortly before her death, that she would not die.  Of all the people in the world over all the many hundreds of thousands of years there have been human beings here, she alone would live without end.  Not, mind you, the widespread (and nevertheless terribly odd) view that somehow or other something survives death or is resurrected after death.  No immortal soul for her.  Seems she thought instead that she would just go on and on, like some Star Trek episode or Greek myth.   Or maybe it was that God picked her out, among the many.  This is hard to make sense of, coming from an adult.  I understand that children get all sorts of odd ideas in their heads, including that somehow they are Hercules reborn or some such.  But Sontag held this thought as an adult.  And made no secret of it.  Of course, she was free to.  No rules (none enforceable anyway) against ridiculous ideas, and it was her time to use if she wanted.  But it does raise a question about the fact that people listened to her, read her work, talked about her as though a serious thinker.  (I admit, I have a bias here in that I never liked any of her works.)  How is this not believing in magic?  Say the right words and up comes the mummy.  And now her notebooks are being published.  The excerpts I have seen suggest that publication is a bad idea.  Of course the notebooks of youth make for some moments of cringing, which is okay if there is a proper reward.  Is there?  What did Sontag say that would make anyone want to read her every word?  I doubt that even the likes of Wittgenstein or Quine, etc., would warrant such publication.  Surely not every word ever from the pen of Eliot or Bishop should be put out in print.  In general I am not much for the publication of the entire corpus of anyone's writings.  Even less reason to give such treatment  who held such a plainly idiotic view -- she would never die -- .   

Belli

The collection of Belli sonnets I have (translated) is small compared to the overall production.  He wrote about 2200 sonnets.  Here is quick overview of the work and man.  The poems are quite amusing.  I may get to some literary studies at some point.  On my first read, they remind me of Baudelaire.  Maybe it was the air.  Belli seems a good deal rowdier, and cruder in the usual sense.  I got interested because of the odd memorial to Belli in Trastavere, right by the Tiber. 

Here is how the little book starts:

The Recollection

The day that Camardella faced the gallows,
I got confirmed...still seems like yesterday--
Godfather, me, the fairground games I played,
the treats I got (some knick-knacks and marshmallows).

My father booked a two-horse coach for us,
though first there was the hanging to enjoy.
"That scaffold,, eh?" he said, "the real McCoy!"
and hoicked me up so I could feel the buzz.

The very moment that the hangman thwacked
the prisoner's sorry arse cheeks into space,
Papa struck a blow across my face--

"Take that," he said, "so one day you'll look back
and understand: this fate is destined to
take down a thousand better men than you."

tr. Mike Stocks.

Books

I am done with the Anne Stevenson and with the Modesty Blaise and with Hiding in the Mirror.

Stevenson was very rewarding, with a caveat.  The last section of the book was taken up with her historical poems.  Maybe they were made from the journals and letters of the characters who populated, and maybe that was an edifice.  Either way, I was bored by those pages.  But the preceding 100 plus pages were full of great poetry, wonderful language and an intelligent mind working.  Very strong work.  And a recipient of that odd "Unrecognized Master" award.  I will put some of the poems up over the next several weeks.

Anne Stevenson is being replaced by Giuseppe Giacchino Belli, Sonnets.  In translation, of course.  That won't last long -- the computer boot-up time is when I read the poetry.  Which gives a surprising amount of time every day for poems.

Modesty Blaise, of course, is entertainment.  The books are relaxing.

Hiding in the Mirror I gave up on.  The writing was not enthralling - boring in fact.  Maybe I did not understand it well enough.  But it seemed a second-runner to some other physics for the uninformed books. 

Physics has been replaced with history.  Next up is the new biography of Lorenzo the Magnificent.  I am actually making a dent in the backlog of books.  In part because I have starting giving up sooner on the boring or badly written.  E.g., The Borgias and Their Enemies was too dull to finish, as was the book on the Lincoln/Douglas debates. 

Samet

Over the weekend I finished Soldier's Heart.  It is two books I think, and only the second was reviewed.  The first is a book about teaching literature in a slightly unusual place.  But literature at West point is not odder than at some college in the countryside.  All have their rituals and curious practices.  Cow-tipping for example.  All have their students who intrigue the faculty, and peculiar traditions.  The first part of Samet's book is just that -- some fo the secret code, some of the good student stories.  Only the locale seems exotic.  Not all that much there I thought.  A pleasant recitation of some pleasant passages in time.  There is also a short second book in the last 75 or 100 pages, about literature and war and warriors.  That book was more interesting and too short.  There Samet touches on what and why her former students read (something other than manuals).  Soldiers and books, that portion offered something to think about.  Ans she had some things to say about the literature of  war, but again too quickly or to short.  It is a difficult area to work in, and to talk about without being ponderous or ridiculous.  Samet mostly hits in between, and so is interesting.  Her students too, although they seem a little thinly drawn.  That second book, had it been longer, would have earned the reviews.

Before the current stuff, I tried teaching undergraduates about war and its relations with moral and political philosophy.  I think the classes failed.  The key problem I could not solve was how to make the issues accessible -- to get students to take seriously what the subject was.  When it comes to discussion of crime or health, it is not as hard because a significant portion of the class either has been a victim or perpetrator of crime, has had some involvement in crime and legal system, or have health care experiences.  Almost none have any sense at all of war outside the theater, and don't really want to think about it.

Modesty

In a bit of nostalgia I am re-reading the Modesty Blaise novels, as far as I can find them in the US.  Modesty Blaise began life as a comic strip character in the UK, but I don't much care for the strips.  And there was a terrible camp film done in the 60's as I recall.  Monica Vitti and Dirk Bogarde.  It is extremely campy and bad, a sort of satire of a completely silly story.  A failure, no surprise.  The novels are, I at least pretend, a bit better.  They are sort of James Bond in drag.  Runs around the world with a side-kick doing good and right on behalf of UK, defeating many peculiar evildoers.  Motivation seems mostly to be love of adrenaline.
In the world of entertainment the world is full of bizarre international criminals.  I read all the novels in college.  Turns out they are not in print in the US anymore.  (fortunately I still have the first US edition in hard cover - must be worth $8 or $10.)  The whole series is back in print in India, but not here.  So I suppose I will turn to Alibra or the like and see what can be found.  James Bond in drag -- I have never read any of the Ian Fleming Bond (or any of the other Bonds).  I've seen the movies, of course, but no inclination to read the novels. Like the Bourne series, come to think of it.  Never read those books either.  And likely never will.  As I think I noted here before, the Wahlberg Bourne Identity is not the first film version -- the previous one starred Kate Jackson ("the smart one") and Richard Chamberlain - just awful, as one would expect.   

Philosophy is a scam.

According to my email filter, Philosophy is a scam.  Should have known. 
I get announcements from Oxford about several different categories of books.  The emails re books on law and on classics come through fine, but the email for new books in philosophy is always marked as a potential scam.  The humanities really have fallen into disrepute.  Or maybe it is just the prevalence of books about Hegel?

Susskind

I finished the Suskind book some time ago. (I need to get this all up to date soon.) Nicely written book -- accessible and entertaining in that physics for innumerates way. It promised an explanation of the Anthropic Principle. If he provided it, I missed it. Multiverse was explained well. Ther are plenty of mentions of an Anthropic Principle, but no real explanation of why one would believe it. That was a disappointment. I suppose the account of multiverse would work part of the way, but it does not provide a basis for thinking that the universe we are in was designed for the purpose. And that is what would be called for I think.

Multiverse I understand in that physics for fools way -- but good enough for afternoon reading.